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^ I don't see a resistivity vs. temperature plot anywhere in the original paper (as it is customary in these kinds of articles), probably because this is a surface effect and the graphite particle won't be able to sustain superconducting behaviour long enough to take the measurement. Still a good progress though. I find the recipe rather amusing, wonder what the referees said about it...

^ I don't see a resistivity vs. temperature plot anywhere in the original paper (as it is customary in these kinds of articles), probably because this is a surface effect and the graphite particle won't be able to sustain superconducting behaviour long enough to take the measurement. Still a good progress though. I find the recipe rather amusing, wonder what the referees said about it...

It looks like they're inferring superconductivity via the magnetic moment. I don't know a whole lot about superconductivity but the article did mention a change in the magnetic moment being linked to superconductivity.

It looks like they're inferring superconductivity via the magnetic moment. I don't know a whole lot about superconductivity but the article did mention a change in the magnetic moment being linked to superconductivity.

Magnetic moment having anything to do with superconductivity is called spin-fluctuation theory (still under debate, but majority thinks it has importance), which says the superconducting behavior is mediated by antiferromagnetic fluctuations. This is different than conventional superconductivity, where superconducting behavior is mediated by crystal excitations called phonons (solved in the 50s).

It is well known that high-Tc superconductors fall into the first category, which is what these guys are apparently saying.

A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel -- a concept popularized in television's Star Trek -- may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say.

A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light. A concept for a real-life warp drive was suggested in 1994 by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, however subsequent calculations found that such a device would require prohibitive amounts of energy.

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science.

SLIDE SHOW: Introducing the Warpship

"There is hope," Harold "Sonny" White of NASA's Johnson Space Center said Friday (Sept. 14) at the 100 Year Starship Symposium, a meeting to discuss the challenges of interstellar spaceflight.

Warping Spacetime

An Alcubierre warp drive would involve a football-shape spacecraft attached to a large ring encircling it. This ring, potentially made of exotic matter, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

Meanwhile, the starship itself would stay inside a bubble of flat space-time that wasn't being warped at all.

"Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light," explained Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit group of scientists and engineers devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight. "But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light."

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

The only problem is, previous studies estimated the warp drive would require a minimum amount of energy about equal to the mass-energy of the planet Jupiter.

ANALYSIS: Warp Drives: Making the 'Impossible' Possible

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

WATCH VIDEOS: SPACEFLIGHT AND EXPLORATION
Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."

Laboratory Tests

White and his colleagues have begun experimenting with a mini version of the warp drive in their laboratory.

They set up what they call the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer at the Johnson Space Center, essentially creating a laser interferometer that instigates micro versions of space-time warps.

"We're trying to see if we can generate a very tiny instance of this in a tabletop experiment, to try to perturb space-time by one part in 10 million," White said.

He called the project a "humble experiment" compared to what would be needed for a real warp drive, but said it represents a promising first step.

ANALYSIS: Interstellar Travel Is Hard, Why Bother?

And other scientists stressed that even outlandish-sounding ideas, such as the warp drive, need to be considered if humanity is serious about traveling to other stars.

"If we're ever going to become a true spacefaring civilization, we're going to have to think outside the box a little bit, were going to have to be a little bit audacious," Obousy said.

I saw that. I'll have to go back and find it, but some French?...maybe Australian....researchers found that even if you can build the drive, charged particles build up at the front. When you "slow down" the particles release and obliterate whatever you were headed toward.

The problem is that the Alcubierre Drive spaceship is going to encounter matter during its trip: space is only nearly empty, not completely empty. Matter traveling towards the ship, the paper says, will become "time locked" with the ship. When the ship decelerates, these hitch-hikers are released from the bubble emitting huge amounts of energy as gamma rays and high-energy particles.

"The amount of energy released infront of the ship is unbounded, as we can increase the energy of the released radiation and particles simply by travelling across a larger distance," McMonigal explained.

Over a span of two weeks in October, the Mira supercomputer will crank away nonstop, processing quadrillions of operations every second - something that few other machines are currently capable of doing. It will simultaneously track trillions of particles as they move, expand and react to each other according to the laws of physics.

This simulation will have to use everything mankind has learned about the movement of objects. If successful, it will not only confirm what we've suspected, but will also give us a deeper understanding of how the cosmos came to be.

Mira is simulating an entire universe.

According to The Atlantic, the advent of Mira (along with the more powerful Sequoia and K supercompters) is the first time that machines have been powerful enough to run a simulation of this scale. A normal computer available today simply could not complete the calculations. And when you consider the specs of the Mira, you realise just how massive this undertaking is.

Built around IBM's BlueGene technology, Mira is powered by 768,000 cores spread across 48 blade racks. (This thing is big! Just like other supercomputers!) It has eight petaflops of processing power, and at its peak theoretical performance is able to perform 10 quadrillion floating point operations per second. Oh, and it has nearly a petabyte of RAM.

So what exactly will Mira simulate in this experiment? Essentially, as The Atlantic explains, researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory are interested in seeing exactly how stars - and entire galaxies - expand, clump together and form the filament structures. The behaviour has led scientists over the years to compare the universe to a web-like structure. The simulation will begin with the universe shortly after the big bang, then it will simulate a time lapse lasting 12 billion years to see if our theories of astrophysics hold up.

Supposing that the experiment does validate centuries of research, we can then begin to move forward. As our understanding increases and supercomputers become more powerful, we can begin to explore crazier ideas, like the possibility that there's more than one universe out there (*mind explodes*).

And the Mira supercomputer? Over its lifespan, it will be operational for five billion computing hours a year. The vast majority of its time will be spent cranking out simulations of DOE-sponsored initiatives and challenges. It will reserve a chunk of its time for projects of "immediate need" (such as the Deepwater Horizon oil crisis). It's safe to say this machine will stay busy, even when it's not deciphering the origins of our existence.

There are more than a few very intelligent and credible people that believe we're living inside of a simulation right now, mainly due to the fact that energy is quantized and the smallest parts of matter have a finite size, which are the same rules we would give a computer to run a physics simulation.

There are more than a few very intelligent and credible people that believe we're living inside of a simulation right now, mainly due to the fact that energy is quantized and the smallest parts of matter have a finite size, which are the same rules we would give a computer to run a physics simulation.